Marlins still awestruck by their sky-high view of Artemis II launch

NEW YORK -- It’s late Friday morning at Yankee Stadium and the Marlins were still talking about what they witnessed on Wednesday evening while they were flying from Miami to New York to face the Yankees.

It just so happened that NASA’s Artemis II launch, which sent up four astronauts from the Kennedy Space Center on Florida’s Space Coast, was visible from the right side of the Marlins’ charter flight.

In a video posted by Marlins.TV reporter Kelly Saco on her Instagram story, the pilot can be heard pointing out the rocket to the oohs and ahs of those on the plane. Right-hander Chris Paddack took photos and sent them to family members.

"It was pretty cool. The pilots made an announcement and the boys kind of looked crazy. It’s a huge thing about going to the moon,” Paddack said. ”It was cool we were able to see it from a birds-eye view up in the air. But it happened so quickly -- we had 10 to 15 seconds to see it, and then it disappeared.”

Right-hander Michael Petersen is a person who likes to leave his headphones on and doze off on a flight -- but he noticed that his teammates were getting out of their seats and moving toward the right side of the plane. Some of them were saying to him, “You've got to see it. You've got to see it. The shuttle is going.”

"I popped my head over there," said Petersen. "Sure enough, you see this little streak going by us. It was wild. It was pretty amazing stuff.”

Center fielder Jakob Marsee called what he witnessed “once in a lifetime,” and appreciated what was going on.

“We were all against the right side of the windows and it was good seeing the shuttle in the air,” Marsee said. “I’m sure we got delayed partly because of it. They didn’t want us to take off yet. The captain came over by radio and said, ‘In two minutes, we are going to see the shuttle.' … You could see the fire coming from the shuttle going up in the air. It was really cool.”

The Artemis II mission will last for 10 days and will be the first crewed lunar flyby in more than 50 years.